Well, we could give up on regret bounds and instead just consider algorithms that asymptotically approach Bayes-optimality. (This would not be moving out of the learning theory setting though? At least not the way I use this terminology.) Regret bounds would still be useful in the context of guaranteeing transfer of human knowledge and values to the AGI, but not in the context of defining intelligence.

However, my intuition is that it would be the wrong way to go.

For one thing, it seems that it is computationally feasible (at least in some weak sense, i.e. for a small number of hypotheses s.t. the optimal policy for each is feasible) to get asymptotic Bayes-optimality for certain learnable classes (PSRL is a simple example) but not in general. I don’t have a proof (and I would be very interested to see either a proof or a refutation), but it seems to be the case AFAIK.

For another thing, consider questions such as, why intelligent agents outcompete instinct-based agents, and why general intelligence (i.e. Bayes optimality or at least some notion of good performance w.r.t. a prior that is “universal” or “nearly universal” in some sense) can be developed by evolution in a rather restricted environment. These questions seem much easier to answer if intelligence has some frequentist property (i.e. it is in some sense effective in all or most environments) compared to, if intelligence has only purely Bayesian properties (i.e. it is only good on average w.r.t. some very broad ensemble of environments).

For another thing, consider questions such as, why intelligent agents outcompete instinct-based agents, and why general intelligence (i.e. Bayes optimality or at least some notion of good performance w.r.t. a prior that is “universal” or “nearly universal” in some sense) can be developed by evolution in a rather restricted environment. These questions seem much easier to answer if intelligence has some frequentist property (i.e. it is in some sense effective in all or most environments) compared to, if intelligence has only purely Bayesian properties (i.e. it is only good on average w.r.t. some very broad ensemble of environments).

I don’t understand why you think this. Suppose there is some simple “naturalized AIXI”-ish thing that is parameterized on a prior, and there exists a simple prior for which an animal running this algorithm with this prior does pretty well in our world. Then evolution may produce an animal running something like naturalized AIXI with this prior. But naturalized AIXI is only good on average rather than guaranteeing effectiveness in almost all environments.

My intuition is that it must not be just a coincidence that the agent happens to works well in our world, otherwise your formalism doesn’t capture the concept of intelligence in full. For example, we are worried that a UFAI would be very likely to kill us in this particular universe, not just in some counterfactual universes. Moreover, Bayesian agents with simple priors often do very poorly in particular worlds, because of what I call “Bayesian paranoia”. That is, if your agent thinks that lifting its left arm will plausibly send it to hell (a rather simple hypothesis), it will never lift its left arm and learn otherwise.

In fact, I suspect that a certain degree of “optimism” is inherent in our intuitive notion of rationality, and it also has a good track record. For example, when scientists did early experiments with electricity, or magnetism, or chemical reactions, their understanding of physics at the time was arguably insufficient to know this will not destroy the world. However, there were few other ways to go forward. AFAIK the first time anyone seriously worried about a physics experiment was the RHIC (unless you also count the Manhattan project, when Edward Teller suggested the atom bomb might create a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction that will envelope the entire atmosphere). These latter concerns were only raised because we already knew enough to point at specific dangers. Of course this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about X-risks! But I think that some form of a priori optimism is plausibly correct, in some philosophical sense. (There was also some thinking in that direction by Sunehag and Hutter although I’m not sold on the particular formalism they consider).

I think I understand your point better now. It isn’t a coincidence that an agent produced by evolution has a good prior for our world (because evolution tries many priors, and there are lots of simple priors to try). But the fact that there exists a simple prior that does well in our universe is a fact that needs an explanation. It can’t be proven from Bayesianism; the closest thing to a proof of this form is that computationally unbounded agents can just be born with knowledge of physics if physics is sufficiently simple, but there is no similar argument for computationally bounded agents.

Well, we could give up on regret bounds and instead just consider algorithms that asymptotically approach Bayes-optimality.

I am not proposing this. I am proposing doing something more like AIXI, which has a fixed prior and does not obtain optimality properties on a broad class of environments. It seems like directly specifying the right prior is hard, and it’s plausible that learning theory research would help give intuitions/models about which prior to use or what non-Bayesian algorithm would get good performance in the world we actually live in, but I don’t expect learning theory to directly produce an algorithm we would be happy with running to make big decisions in our universe.

Yes, I think that we’re talking about the same thing. When I say “asymptotically approach Bayes-optimality” I mean the equation from Proposition A.0 here. I refer to this instead of just Bayes-optimality, because exact Bayes-optimality is computationally intractable even for a small number of hypothesis each of which is a small MDP. However, even asymptotic Bayes-optimality is usually only tractable for some learnable classes, AFAIK: for example if you have environments without traps then PSRL is asymptotically Bayes-optimal.